This course focuses on two fundamental questions in the areas of Visual Rhetoric and Visual Semiotics, namely, how language-like are 'visuals' and how do certain images acquire exceptional power to rouse our feelings and even convey our cultural identity(ies)? We will begin with Roland Barthes' famous claim that photographs communicate without a code and question whether that claim still holds in this age of ever increasing digital image manipulation. We will look closely at Kress and van Leeuwen's Reading Images to consider whether and in what ways it is useful to speak of a grammar of visual design. And we will look at different claims about 'visual literacy'.

We then move from signification to embodiment and power (particularly cultural power), beginning with the first few chapters of Ann Marie Seward Barry's Visual Intelligence. This takes up the ancient theme of emotion v. reason in relation to modern neurophysiology of vision and the power of images to manipulate and persuade. We then turn to the Hariman and Lucaites book on iconic photographs and a portion of Benedikt Feldges' book on iconic figures created in American TV, where generally it is argued that certain images come to convey our cultural identities by the way they are deployed rather than by their intrinsic visual qualities. This will also engage us in issues of witnessing, documentary, and the ethics of viewing.

Written work for the seminar will include collecting and analyzing images and a seminar paper addressing one of the controversial issues touched on in the course.

WARNING! The word icon is used–differently– in almost everything we read.

It is said that some concepts are harder to illustrate than others, especially things which are not present (absence, loss), involve temporal processes (aging, decay, development) or are traits and properties manifested over time (maturity, sincerity, corruption, dependency) or abstract conditions like vulnerability, expertise, harmony, or persistence/endurance, or are abstractly relations with myriad shapes like solution and equal. Illustrators take this line of thinking as a challenge and have developed various workarounds and conventions (e.g. for innocence or femininity/masculinity). The construction of mega tagged image banks like those at Corbis and Getty Images have created tables of image-tag correspondences as if none of these limitations were of much weight. This exercise asks you to examine the images offered in those two archives for two of the problem-case words given here (say, the first 50 images in each archive) and to describe the strategies of depiction (and compare them). Also, pick out one or two that you think are the most insightful or effective, and that might actually be useful to help someone understand the verbally expressed concept, and say why this is so. You can also pick out one or two for us to hoot at. Tic both "photo" and "illustration" options, and compare the photographic images with the drawings in terms of the coding of drawings. Keep track of the 4 carriers of connotation in the images, namely,

Project #2 asks you to collect some ads using hybrid spaces from an issue or issues of a magazine and analyze the alternations and mergings of representational styles and spaces (e.g., the photorealistic vs. the abstract or diagrammatic or expressive or typographic.) Point out differences in composition and in photogenia that help to distinguish the representational spaces. What do these representational hybrids say about (one's experience of) the product?